No Arabic abstract
Electron-positron annihilation largely occurs in local thermal and chemical equilibrium after the neutrinos fall out of thermal equilibrium and during the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) epoch. The effects of this process are evident in BBN yields as well as the relativistic degrees of freedom. We self-consistently calculate the collision integral for electron-positron creation and annihilation using the Klein-Nishina amplitude and appropriate statistical factors for Fermi-blocking and Bose-enhancement. Our calculations suggest that this annihilation freezes out when the photon-electron-positron-baryon plasma temperature is approximately 16 keV, after which its rate drops below the Hubble rate. In the temperature regime near 16 keV, we break the assumption of chemical equilibrium between the electrons, positrons, and photons to independently calculate the evolution of the chemical potentials of the electrons and positrons while computing the associated collision integrals at every time step. We find that the electron and positron chemical potentials deviate from the case with chemical equilibrium. While our results do not affect the interpretation of precision cosmological measurements in elucidating the standard cosmological model, these out of equilibrium effects may be important for testing physics beyond the standard model.
The nature of dark matter (DM) and how it might interact with the particles of the Standard Model (SM) is one of greatest mysteries currently facing particle physics, and addressing these issues should provide some understanding of how the observed relic abundance was produced. One widely considered production mechanism, a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) produced as a thermal relic, provides a target cross section for DM annihilation into SM particles by solving the Boltzmann equation. In this thermal freeze-out mechanism, dark matter is produced in thermal equilibrium with the SM in the early universe, and drops out of equilibrium to its observed abundance as the universe cools and expands. In this paper, we study the impact of a generalized thermodynamics, known as Tsallis statistics and governed by a parameter $q$, on the target DM annihilation cross section. We derive the phase space distributions of particles in this generalized statistical framework, and check their thermodynamic consistency, as well as analyzing the impact of this generalization on the collisional term of the Boltzmann equation. We consider the case of an initial value of $q_0>1$, with $q$ relaxing to 1 as the universe expands and cools, and solve the generalized Boltzmann numerically for several benchmark DM masses, finding the corresponding target annihilation cross sections as a function of $q_0$. We find that as $q$ departs from the standard thermodynamic case of $q=1$, the collisional term falls less slowly as a function of $x = m_chi/T$ than expected in the standard case. We also find that the target cross section falls sharply from $sigma v simeq 2.2-2.6times10^{-26} textrm{cm}^3/textrm{s}$ for $q_0=1$ to, for example, $sigma v simeq 3times 10^{-34} textrm{cm}^3/textrm{s}$ for $q_0=1.05$ for a 100 GeV WIMP.
We calculate the cross section for the exclusive production of J^{PC}=0^{++} glueballs G_0 in association with the J/psi in e^+e^- annihilation using the pQCD factorization formalism. The required long-distance matrix element for the glueball is bounded by CUSB data from a search for resonances in radiative Upsilon decay. The cross section for e^+e^- -> J/psi+ G_0 at sqrt{s}=10.6 GeV is similar to exclusive charmonium-pair production e^+e^- -> J/psi+h for h=eta_c and chi_{c0}, and is larger by a factor 2 than that for h=eta_{c}(2S). As the subprocesses gamma^* -> (c c-bar) (c c-bar) and gamma^* -> (c c-bar) (g g) are of the same nominal order in perturbative QCD, it is possible that some portion of the anomalously large signal observed by Belle in e^+ e^- -> J/psi X may actually be due to the production of charmonium-glueball J/psi G_J pairs.
In this work we study the e^{+}e^{-}tophi K^{+}K^{-} reaction. The leading order electromagnetic contributions to this process involve the gamma*phi K^{+}K^{-} vertex function with a highly virtual photon. We calculate this function at low energies using Rchi PT supplemented with the anomalous term for the VVP interactions. Tree level contributions involve the kaon form factors and the K*K transition form factors. We improve this result, valid for low photon virtualities, replacing the lowest order terms in the kaon form factors and K*K transition form factors by the form factors as obtained in Uchi PT in the former case and the ones extracted from recent data on e^{+}e^{-}to KK* in the latter case. We calculate rescattering effects which involve meson-meson amplitudes. The corresponding result is improved using the unitarized meson-meson amplitudes containing the scalar poles instead of the lowest order terms. Using the BABAR value for BR(Xto phi f_{0})Gamma (Xto e^{+} e^{-}), we calculate the contribution from intermediate X(2175). A good description of data is obtained in the case of destructive interference between this contribution and the previous ones, but more accurate data on the isovector K*K transition form factor is required in order to exclude contributions from an intermediate isovector resonance to e^{+}e^{-}to phi K^{+}K^{-} around 2.2 GeV.
The reactions of electron-positron to nucleon-antinucleon pairs are studied in a non-perturbative quark model. The work suggests that the two-step process, in which the primary quark-antiquark pair forms first a vector meson which in turn decays into a hadron pair, is dominant over the one-step process in which the primary quark-antiquark pair is directly dressed by additional quark-antiquark pairs to form a hadron pair. To reproduce the experimental data of the reactions of electron-positron to proton-antiproton and electron-positron to neutron-antineutron a D-wave omega-like vector meson with a mass of around 2 GeV has to be introduced.
$P$-wave coupled channel effects arising from the $Dbar{D}$, $Dbar{D}^*+c.c.$, and $D^*bar{D}^*$ thresholds in $e^+e^-$ annihilations are systematically studied. We provide an exploratory study by solving the Lippmann-Schwinger equation with short-ranged contact potentials obtained in the heavy quark limit. These contact potentials can be extracted from the $P$-wave interactions in the $e^+e^-$ annihilations, and then be employed to investigate possible isosinglet $P$-wave hadronic molecules. In particular, such an investigation may provide information about exotic candidates with quantum numbers $J^{PC}=1^{-+}$. In the mass region of the $Dbar{D}$, $Dbar{D}^*+c.c.$, and $D^*bar{D}^*$ thresholds, there are two quark model bare states, i.e. the $psi(3770)$ and $psi(4040)$, which are assigned as $(1^3D_1)$ and $(3^1S_1)$ states, respectively. By an overall fit of the cross sections of $e^+e^-to Dbar{D}$, $Dbar{D}^*+c.c.$, $D^*bar{D}^*$, we determine the physical coupling constants to each channel and extract the pole positions of the $psi(3770)$ and $psi(4040)$. The deviation of the ratios from that in the heavy quark spin symmetry (HQSS) limit reflects the HQSS breaking effect due to the mass splitting between the $D$ and the $D^*$. Besides the two poles, we also find a pole a few MeV above the $Dbar{D}^*+c.c.$ threshold which can be related to the so-called $G(3900)$ observed earlier by BABAR and Belle. This scenario can be further scrutinized by measuring the angular distribution in the $D^*bar{D}^*$ channel with high luminosity experiments.